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Data center humidity and paper problems.

I'm a dinosaur, I work in a large computer room - mainframes, servers, PC's, printers - the whole ball of wax. What I am having a problem with is this: my 'superiors' insist on keeping the relative humidity above 50%.

Tonight it was 65% and my 132 character green bar paper wouldn't stack worth a damn. I go through this with them EVERY summer, but never get anywhere.

Can anyone help me make a case for a lower relative humidity in a computer room? Supporting information is really what I am looking for, but ANY help would be appreciated.

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Google

I entered "optimum computer room humidity" and got 835,000 hits. I didn't read any - on a Saturday? That's your job - but if you can't find some seriously authoritative answers in that lot then you aren't trying. Collect a few sources together from IBM, etc, write a paper and slap them with it.

In my experience

Over the years, I have had quite a few problems with relative humidity above 55% that have caused poor print quality in various printers. Laser printers are really touchy and will begin to develop "halos" around the characters when it gets too high. NEC used to make a popular printer that would refuse to print properly when the paper was exposed to high humidity, users had to place unused paper in tupperware containers to keep them dry. This was in an uncontrolled environment, and what you see was what you got. Now the lab was different, it was 68 degrees and 35% humidity and never changed one percent or one degree. High speed page printers can really output some crappy looking stuff if the humidity gets too high. (Over 70 percent) Stacking can get to be a real pain, and paper cuts will become numerous after excessive handling. A trick I've used is to **** air between the sheets as you shuffle them to align.

The air thing

I was also going to suggest blowing air between the sheets. I guess it depends if you have access to an air hose. I worked in a large corporate printing facility, with numerous printers, and the one thing that we did with all of our stock was give it a quick **** down the cut edges. The seperation helps get the stock acclimated to the enviroment.

Can't believe no one mentioned this.

Nor can I believe someone in a mainframe room has not mentioned it. Relative humidity is vital to the functioning of your computers, servers, mainframes and heck, even your toaster although to a much lesser degree. A room that houses servers and mainframes _MUST_ have a relative humidity between 30% - 50%. If you're humidity is below 30% then dangerous levels of ESD (static shock but I have to stress dangerous levels again) that will damage your equipment and furthermore lower humidity levels cause plastic to age much faster. Now here is the dangerous aspect of humidity in a server room. When humidity is too high then it forms condensation on a relative level to the AC. This doesn't mean if your room is hot enough that it doesn't form but a larger amount of it stays gaseous. Now in a server / mainframe room that is optimally cooled to 70 degrees Fahrenheit with a rH of 55%, you will have moisture forming inside your computer equipment which means you are looking at rust and short circuits forming and they form much quicker then you expect. Even in a room with 50% rH and 80 degrees Fahrenheit dangerous levels of condensation occur but over a relatively longer time frame. Keep humidity at 40% which leaves you with a 10% margin to unsafe.

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